Style

Narration/Narrative/Narrator

There is an almost dizzying number of levels of narration and narrators in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow": a) Washington Irving is the author of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. ; b) Geoffrey Crayon is the fictional author of the volume, the one responsible for collection or creating the stories and sketches; c) Diedrich Knickerbocker is the character who supposedly wrote down "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," and in whose hand the postscript was "found," presumably by Crayon; d) the legend was told to Knickerbocker by a "pleasant, shabby, gentlemanly old fellow"; e) within the legend, the characters tell stories that they have heard or read, many of them concerning "a figure on horseback without a head." Ichabod Crane, then, is a man who is frightened by a story within a story within a story within a story.